ransgresses the very
law which is for ever on its tongue, is turned by his passionate and
sorely-tempted character into a too easy excuse for disbelieving in
the obligation of any law whatsoever. He ceases to worship, and
therefore to be himself worshipful--and we know the rest.

"He might have still worshipped God?" He might, and surely amid all
his sins, doubts, and confusions, the remembrance of the old faith
learned at his parent's knee, does haunt him still as a beautiful
regret--and sometimes, in his bitterest hours, shine out before his
poor broken heart as an everlasting Pharos, lighting him homewards
after all. Whether he reached that home or not, none on earth can
tell. But his writings show, if anything can, that the vestal-fire
of conscience still burned within, though choked again and again with
bitter ashes and foul smoke. Consider the time in which he lived,
when it was "as with the people, so with the priest," and the grand
old life-tree of the Scottish Kirk, now green and vigorous with fresh
leaves and flowers, was all crusted with foul scurf and moss, and
seemed to have ceased growing, and to be crumbling down into decay;
consider the terrible contradiction between faith and practice which
must have met the eyes of the man, before he could write with the
same pen--and one as honestly as the other--"The Cottar's Saturday
Night," and "Holy Willie's Prayer." But those times are past, and
the men who acted in them gone to another tribunal. Let the dead
bury their dead; and, in the meantime, instead of cursing the
misguided genius, let us consider whether we have not also something
for which to thank him; whether, as competent judges of him aver from
their own experience, those very seeming blasphemies of his have not
produced more good than evil; whether, though "a savour of death unto
death," to conceited and rebellious spirits, they may not have helped
to open the eyes of the wise to the extent to which the general
eighteenth-century rottenness had infected Scotland, and to make
intolerable a state of things which ought to have been intolerable,
even if Burns had never written.

We are not attacking the reviewer, far less the "Edinburgh Review,"
which some years after this not only made the amende honorable to
Burns, but showed a frank impartiality only too rare in the reviews
of these days, by publishing in its pages the noble article on Burns
which has since appeared separately in Mr. Carlyle'